Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Alasdair Urquhart was nice enough to identify the model that’s dominating the lounge at BIRS. It’s an icosidodecahedral prismatohexacosihecatonicosachoron, and is made of 120 icosidodecahedra, 600 cuboctahedra, 720 pentagonal prisms, its faces are 3600 triangles, 3600 squares, 1440 pentagons, and it has 10,800 edges. I’m sure it’s got something to do with E8 (the mapping…

My colleague Marc has updated his SEP entry on Species. Jon Willimason is starting a new online thing called The Reasoner. The Reasoner is a monthly digest highlighting exciting new research on reasoning and interesting new arguments. It is interdisciplinary, covering research in, e.g., philosophy, logic, AI, statistics, cognitive science, law, psychology, mathematics and the…

Ok, I wasn’t really attacked so much as passed by. Anyway, the slides for my talk at the Annual Meeting are here.

Thanks to Greg for (almost) liveblogging the Banff workshop on Mathematical Methods in Philosophy. So go to Greg’s blog to find out what happened!

In his talk this morning, Grisha Mints referred to a paper by Paul Cohen. He didn’t have the reference handy, so I tracked it down: Paul J. Cohen, Skolem and pessimism about proof in mathematics. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2005) 363, 2407–2418. The entire issue, on meeting on “The nature of mathmatical proof” organized…

Just in case you ever need it: \ddots going the other direction: \makeatletter\def\Ddots{\mathinner{\mkern1mu\raise\p@ \vbox{\kern7\p@\hbox{.}}\mkern2mu \raise4\p@\hbox{.}\mkern2mu\raise7\p@\hbox{.}\mkern1mu}}\makeatother Then you can say: \varepsilon_0= \omega^{\omega^{\Ddots}}

For some reason I missed the memo that said that Kenny Easwaran‘s blog moved from antimeta.org to his Berkeley webspace.

This morning has two talks on modal logic: first up was Marcus Kracht with a survey on the development of modal logic; now Steve Awodey is reporting on joint work with Kishida on topological semantics of first-order modal logic. Marcus talked about some interesting results in the mathematics of modal logic, especially general semantics for…

Ok. Brit posted about it. Apparently some people claim that the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index (FSP) shows something about the rankings produced by the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR) (e.g., that they’re off). But it doesn’t. That is not because the PGR is actually the best possible way to measure program or even faculty quality. It…

I just had occasion to have to typeset Lewis’s strict conditional symbol <img src="http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2004/symbols/fishhook.gif" alt="- in LaTeX. It turns out it isn’t in the standard AMS fonts. Peter Smith’s LaTeX for Logicians to the rescue! There I found: that the strict conditional symbol is in the fonts that are part of the txfonts and pxfonts…